Amy Frazier - Independence Day

In the moonlight, Chessie sent her husband a sultry look.

“As in…?”

“As in teenage-just-got-the-license park.” She flipped up the armrest, then slid across the front seat to snuggle next to him.

Nick glanced at his watch.

“Not on this date, mister!” she exclaimed, pulling the watch from his wrist and tossing it into the back seat.

“You folks need to move along.” The gruff voice seemed to be right in the car with them.

“What the hell!” Nick raised his hand to shield his eyes from the brightness.

“Nick?” The voice behind the blinding light boomed with amusement. “Chessie? For the love of Mike, you’d think the two of you could take it home.” The police officer lowered his flashlight. It was George Weiss. Their neighbor. “Or at least a hotel room.”

“We were watching the moon rise,” Chessie explained sweetly.

“Among other things,” George added. “I’m going to give you kids my usual safe-sex lecture.” He dug into his pockets. “And these.” He handed Nick a couple packets of condoms.

“Save the lecture, George,” Nick muttered. “We’re heading home.”

“Don’t let me come back in an hour and find you here.” George grinned as if he were really enjoying this. “I’d have to write you up.”

Dear Reader,

Independence Day was probably the most difficult book I’ve written. It’s not about a traditional courtship, the kind that always provides me with such a lovely escape. This is a book that addresses the question “What happens after happily-ever-after?” More often than not, it’s a roller-coaster ride of peaks and valleys. Sometimes the romance fades. Sometimes the passion gets lost in careers and families and pressing responsibility. This could be my life—and writing about issues that cut so close to the bone was very uncomfortable….

But is the rosy glow of courtship retrievable in a marriage? Absolutely, yes! Or so believes my heroine, Chessie McCabe. But for her, it will take a revolution. Little does she know that her quest to rekindle the passion in her workaholic, emotionally AWOL husband, Nick, will throw her family into turmoil and lead to a journey of self-discovery. Chessie and Nick learn that as great as the need for food and shelter is the need to be seen and heard.

Married twenty-nine years, I learned a lot from Chessie.

All my best,

Amy Frazier

P.S. So involved was I with this fictional couple that my daughter began to worry about them, too, calling from college for updates…. So, Sarah, did I guide them safely through the storm?

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

“ON STRIKE, I SAID!” Exhilaration racing through her veins, Chessie McCabe threw another armload of dirty laundry from the bedroom window. “I’m on strike until my needs are met!”

Crumpled socks, T-shirts, shorts and underwear surrounding them like some freak snowfall on the summer-green grass below, Chessie’s husband and two teenage daughters gaped up at her. She didn’t blame them. This wasn’t her usual behavior.

Her usual behavior involved patience. Large dollops of nurturing. Calmly maintained family schedules. An abundance of behind-the-scenes hugs, kisses, back rubs, pep talks and emotional support. Not public hysteria.

Well, this might be public, but it wasn’t hysteria. It was a personal Fourth-of-July rebellion. And long overdue.

“Mom!” Fourteen-year-old Gabriella seemed about to die of mortification. “What are we supposed to do with this stuff?”

“I don’t care. Wash it in the harbor. Pound it on the rocks. String it from boat to boat to dry. It’s your dirty laundry. From this day forward, I wash my hands of it.”

Her husband, Nick, eyed her silently. Even from her perspective at the bedroom window, Chessie could see the muscle along his jaw twitch. Not a good sign. And normally one that would send her into peacemaker mode. But not today. Today, the three of them could try to smooth her ruffled feathers.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” she declared, empowered by her second-story podium and the resonant Maine air. “I love the three of you very much. But I’ve spoiled you all rotten. From this day forward, my needs are as important as yours.” She held her fist aloft in a militant salute. “Chessie McCabe is a doormat no more!”

“Mom!” Gabriella jerked her head toward the sidewalk opposite the McCabe cottage. “People…”

Chessie noted with some satisfaction that several obvious out-of-towners, cameras slung round their necks, had stopped on their way to the planned festivities at the village square. Had stopped and begun to stare at the little drama playing out on the front lawn. A small crowd. How handy. Every woman on the verge of rediscovering herself should find an audience.

She grinned. They probably thought this was all part of the town-sanctioned fun, a quaint reenactment of some obscure New England history. Tourists always thought Down-Easters so colorful.

Well, she’d show them colorful.

She plucked Nick’s jockstrap from the bedroom floor behind her. With a whoop of pure abandon, she snapped the strap slingshot style, sending it arcing over her family’s heads to settle on the roof of the purple martin birdhouse in the corner rose garden.

Seventeen-year-old Isabel slouched against the white picket fence around the front yard, embarrassment clouding her sober features.

Nick glanced from the stranded athletic supporter to the smirking tourists to his daughters to his watch. That damned watch. Then, with the same practiced patience he’d use as high-school principal on any one of his recalcitrant students, he stared up at his wife and cleared his throat.

“Chessie,” he said, enunciating carefully. “The parade starts in ten minutes. I have a speech to give in thirty. Could we discuss this later?”

Chessie took a deep breath for courage. Across the street her friend Martha Weiss stood in her doorway, a bemused expression on her face. “Could we discuss this later?” she repeated, returning her gaze to Nick. “I don’t think so. What I want from the three of you is a little bit of now.”

One of the tourists, a middle-aged woman wearing an enormous red hat and a purple jersey tunic, applauded.

Feeling a glorious sense of release, Chessie slammed the window shut. She picked up her empty coffee mug, then headed downstairs to her studio and her potter’s wheel in the barn. Not that she expected to get any work done immediately. Nick and the girls wouldn’t let her opening salvo go unanswered. Oh, no.

Hormonally charged Gabriella wouldn’t lose this opportunity to tell her mother—yet again—how she was absolutely ruining the teenager’s life. While sweet, sensitive and poetic Isabel would take the opportunity to watch life unfold before her, ever the observer, marginally the participant.

And Nick…

Nick. Nick. Nick.

Nick, the proud and virile man Chessie had married eighteen years ago, would inwardly seethe at this inconvenient show of emotion, this lack of family solidarity. Nick, the workaholic and determined provider she’d followed around the country as he’d climbed his way from beginner teacher to full-fledged-high-school-principal-on-the-fast-track-tosuperintendent…this Nick wouldn’t be amused by her rebellion. Her husband, the now restrained and emotionally distant man she loved as a part of herself, but no longer understood, would instantly go into denial.